Nine the second morning Lexie’s ma arrives, trailing luggage. Bony calves in expensive hosiery poking out from under her tweed skirt. A Harrods astrakhan hat crammed on to springs of auburn hair.
‘This was always going to happen, Joe,’ she says crisply, as she comes in. ‘And forgive me if I blame you. You and your job.’
I don’t answer. I watch her kiss Lexie. I watch her summon the nurse to clean the thin line of saliva that runs down Lexie’s chin. I watch her survey the room and get comfortable, hang up her coat and hat, arrange her belongings, and sit down primly, one hand on her skirt because I’m definitely enough of a pig to try getting a look at her knickers, the cacky old mare. And I don’t say a word.
We sit like this for thirty-six hours, locked in a monumental battle of wills: the first to wilt, to give up the vigil, is the loser. I spend my time slumped in my chair, staring sullenly across the room, a leaflet they’ve given me crumpled in my hand: Managing the Future After Burns: Psycho-Social Needs. She sits upright, her mouth pursed as she peers at the Telegraph crossword over the top of her specs. I keep studying her, making sure she never tries to switch on her mobile phone. We’ve all been told not to have any contact with the outside world, not even with relatives and friends, and I’m not going to give her a chance. Because the police have got a problem.
At first when the word came through about Lex everyone up at Oban was secretly relieved: Malachi Dove had done his bit to fuck with my head and it had taken out just one person, not hundreds like they’d been afraid. But now they saw the catch: in Dove’s head his job was over because he thought Lex was dead. Reality was different. A local reporter had got wind of a ‘domestic’ at the rape suite. He hadn’t connected it yet to the Pig Island massacre, but when his usual police contact stonewalled him over it he knew there was more and he was starting to dig. Danso was going crazy trying to contain it: he knew Dove was finished now, but Danso wanted to be sure before they let anything out to the papers. We wanted Dove’s body. There were blinds on the private room and every nurse and doctor who came through was warned not to speak to anyone. Not even a friend. Still, you got the feeling that any time now the bag was going to split and it was all going to come out. If Lexie’s ma so much as moved her hand near to her phone I was going to be on her.
Angeline had been trying to get us to leave the room, to get some proper rest – there were couches in the relatives’ room we could stretch out on, and she’d call us if anything happened. She kept limping in and out of the room, ferrying coffee and Snickers bars, asking when they were going to wake Lex up. At eleven a.m. on day two she brought in four doughnuts in a pink-and-white-striped box. There was a blue picture of a chef’s hat on it. She placed a napkin on the chair next to Lex’s ma and carefully put two doughnuts on it.
Lex’s mother looked down at them and gave a small laugh. ‘And they say the nation’s youth don’t know how to eat properly.’
Angeline paused, and for a moment I thought she was going to take the doughnuts back. But she didn’t. Instead she straightened and moved calmly to my chair, putting the box down and setting the coffee next to it. ‘My mother’s dead,’ she said, addressing no one, but making us both raise our eyes to her. ‘My mother’s dead, but she was beautiful. She was beautiful and she was kind. And she loved me.’
I looked at her. Somehow in the last two weeks her hair had grown enough to cover the bare patches of scalp. It was brushed and there was even a bit of light reflected in it. She looked like she’d put some mascara on and there was something defiant about her as she stared at Lex’s ma.
‘Yes,’ she said, almost trembling with the effort of keeping her voice in control. ‘And you know what? I think she was right. I think she was right to love me.’
She rested a napkin on top of the doughnut box, and, like nothing had been said, like we weren’t both staring at her, she sat on the chair in the corner, pulled the lid off her coffee and drank.